When a user attempts to shut down an operating system, such as the Windows XP brand operating system by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. or the Mac OS X operating system by Apple Computer, Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., certain applications possess the ability to cancel or indefinitely block shut down. When shut down is temporarily blocked by other applications, the user experience can be unpleasant as the user may not be provided with any system generated indication of what is going on and shut down is obviously delayed.
As an example, in the Windows XP brand operating system, when a user has an unsaved document in an application such as Microsoft Word and attempts to shut down his computer, Word will display a dialog box prompting the user as to whether he desires to save the document. Assuming that Word is hung or not responding, Windows then occludes the first dialog box with a second dialog box asking the user whether he would like to end the application now (immediately) and lose any unsaved data. If the user chooses to end the application now the application closes and another running application, if one exists, will generate a similar pair of dialogs until all applications have been terminated. If the user chooses not to end the application now, the application continues closing on its own. Once completed, if the user has other running applications, the process repeats itself for each application until all the applications close. Then the system finally shuts down. From the aforementioned description, shutting down the operating system can be frustrating, tedious and most certainly longer than desired. Additionally, the applications that block the operating system shut down often do not explain to the user what task the application is currently performing or why the application is blocking shut down.